Courses
Artificial Intelligence in Games
Understand the differences between traditional AI and AI applied to game development, where other factors such as playability are more relevant that the oponent’s intelligence level. Be familiar with the practical problems when developing AI for video games, and with the several techniques applied in comercial video games. Know how to design and build an AI system for a video game independently of its genre (action, sport, strategy, narrative).
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
To acquire general notions about agents and multi-agent systems; knowing how to identify and classify agents and environments, according to different properties. Knowing how to develop complex systems and systems from different application areas, using an agent-oriented methodology. Knowing how to define a society of agents in order to solve a specific problem. Being able to design agents with reactive, deliberative and hybrid architectures. Being able to create societies of agents that communicate, in a practical way, using suitable languages and platforms.
Computer Graphics for Games
This course covers both theory and practice of game engine software development. It delves into the different engine subsystems including, but not limited to, rendering, character animation, and physics, and details the articulation required to support gameplay development. By the end of this course, students should understand how modern game engines work, and be able to design and develop their own game engines.
Game Design
This course grants the students the opportunity to develop their skills on experience design and prototyping for games. The learning process is sustained in the discussion of what is a game, what are its components and what is its relation to the players (having in mind their differences). It is expected that the student develop design documents and prototypes to support his/her work on the course.
Game Development Methodology
Present a vision of the different methodologies and technologies involved in the development of digital games discussing the main features and issues in each one. Grant students with conceptual tools and techniques to develop user interfaces for games with special emphasis on player controls. Develop the ability to reflect and test the player experience and gameplay. Discuss the role of conceptual modelling and user testing. Highlight the importance to take a user centred approach in the exploration of the player experience.
Multimedia Content Production
Know the different types of multimédia information and how to manipulate them to poduce multimedia content. To understand the technological constraints that affect Production. To understand critical factors affect the success of a production, namely in aspects such as capture, encoding, processing and visualization of the different media. To know the different kinds of available authoring tools. To create Multimedia contents; To identify the different contexts in which multimedia can be consumed, with emphasys on online and network issues (evaluate bandwidth, latency, synchronization, etc.) and mobile devices. Introduce some advanged multimedia usages such as procedural modelling, generative art augmented reality. Apply efficient methods of multimedia content retrieval.
Thesis
Fishing for Words: A game to learn grammatical gender in Portuguese
Learning a language can be very useful and fun, but also a lot of work. Portuguese, a language with grammatical gender, can be particularly challenging for learners whose native language lacks this feature. In this thesis, we took a look at the history of language education and existing language-learning platforms, which served to inform our own efforts, and developed Fishing for Words, a videogame for Android and Windows that helps players memorize the gender of words in Portuguese at the A2 level of proficiency, featuring two word-selection systems (which balance the game's difficulty in real-time according to the player's performance): The classic Leitner System and a novel Tag System. A full experimental procedure was developed and tested, with the purpose of validating its effectiveness, which revealed several pitfalls through which an experimenter evaluating such a game might fail to obtain results. In other words, we provide insight into how to get the participants to play the game and stick with it, which ours did not. Our main conclusions were that the game should be tested with more advanced students (who we suspect have more interest in grammatical gender), that the students should be given more time & more encouragement to play and that the game should be available on a wider range of platforms (around half of our participants could not play due to not having Android nor Windows).
Reimplementing a Strategy Game Interface
Almansur is a multiplayer turn based strategy browser game developed throughout the last decade. This project aimed to create a new version of Almansur, focusing on improving the usability of the interface, making it easier to to teach new users, and more efficient to use for the current ones. This document describes the development process of this new version. First the existing game was analyzed, creating a conceptual model, a list of possible tasks in the interface, and comparing it with other games of the same genre. This interface was then tested by player observation and with the Nielsen Heuristics to identify its current usability faults. A new interface was then created, first on paper, then in a simple interactive prototype, and finally in its full implementation, which iterated multiple times through development. Finally the resulting work was tested and compared with the previous version, using both old and new players to the game.